•
Rating:
Can a concert viewed be different from one listened to on a record? Can it be or can it seem so? Where do the boundaries exactly lie...?
How large can the subjectivity be, the emotion of the moment, the personal memory, the bond between the beautiful things lived and those beautifully listened to?
In short, my dear friends...at the end of the day, how reliable can our poor judgment really be...?
I've written about it before (and I won't repeat): at the Arcimboldi I enjoyed myself like crazy. I experienced that past which, since it's already past, is believed to no longer be...and yet you find it right there. Chaotic and frigid at the same time, highly organized and improvised.
And now the album is out. I was waiting for it. I wanted it. I listened to it.
I enjoyed it. Yes...but quite a bit less.
Is it my fault? Did something go wrong?
The singer-songwriter's doughnut, my friends, didn't come out with its nice hole, and this is the bitter, but not entirely despairing, reality.
Not entirely despairing because what you hear in this album is a real concert, heartfelt, old and very young. Because the music traverses some of the most beautiful pages of our country's musical literature of the late twentieth century. Because those two are still great (we'll talk about the differences...).
And because the three unreleased tracks are each more beautiful than the other, just as the studio version of "Generale" is splendid (...why in the studio?...).
So what's wrong...? Above all, unfortunately, the voice of Lucio Dalla. And my heart is bleeding just thinking about it, let alone writing it. But our (was he?) great Lucio no longer sings well. He is always somewhat flat, uncertain. The "attack," his most combative, biting characteristic, that note which was once like a gunshot, is now a shaky little thing, poorly held... In short, there's the timbre (at times almost unrecognizable for that, but let's say it's there...), but the rest has flown away.
No one who has written about this tour or this album, as far as I know, has noticed it, but in my opinion, it's as evident as it is sadly embarrassing. Just like the arrangements, where the decaying Dalla has undoubtedly taken too much power, with useless, silly, baroque choruses, and equally useless and easily unmasked tricks. Arranging their first adventure (the immortal masterpiece of '79, "Banana Republic") were Ron (the Ron of then...) and Stadio (as far as arrangements go, the Stadio of always...). And it was a whole different thing.
And then everything is weighed down (I already noticed it at the Arcimboldi) by a scholarly drummer, timely, pretty good...yes, but totally soulless. Not one capable of making you bounce, but probably not even of making you move the proverbial foot. And this is, in essence, somewhat the whole band, almost as if a rift, a violent contrast, had been willed between the fantasy of the protagonists and the static, scholarly, and pretty good immobility of the bases (there's undoubtedly the hand of Dalla in this, who, as he lost talent and genius over the years, grew in terms of baroque flourishes and nerdy precision...).
In short: imagine what this album could have been with a "jazz band" like Conte's first one, which is then the eternal one of Guccio (the various Tavolazzi, Tempera, Bandini, Marangolo, etc., speaking of old ones...but you can also find young, brilliant ones...).
In short: a historic album, of a historic event, which is historically doomed to a state of perpetual imperfection.
It could have been proof that singer-songwriting was great and is alive.
It is unfortunately proof that singer-songwriting was great, perhaps even greater than we imagined. But it is undoubtedly dead.
To prove it, among other things, are those backing vocals, those "thirds from the tavern," which are so beautiful, yes, but when you have dinners with friends and, at a certain point, someone "brings out" the guitar...
Loading comments slowly
